The whole southern country of Judea, within Idumea.

It swallowed up also the whole country of south Judea, which was more generally marked out by two names, 'The Upper and the Nether South': more particularly and diffusively, as some of the Jews please, it is divided into seven parts...

So that when the Holy Scripture divides the south of Judea from Idumea, Numbers 34 and Joshua 15--we must know that dividing line now is broken, and all the south of Judea is called Idumea. But here, by the way, I cannot but note the Arabic interpreter, who renders Edom, in Joshua 15:1, by Rome:--by what authority let himself look to it; so let the Jews do too, who commonly call the 'Romans,' 'Edomites.'

How much this New Idumea shot itself into Judea is not to be defined; since it admitted indeed no limits, but where either the force or fraud of that nation could not thrust itself in farther. If you betake yourself to Josephus, here and there speaking of that nation, you would think that it extended almost as far as Hebron. Thence, perhaps, were those endeavours of some, of freeing the hill-country of Judea from tithing. Of which endeavour we can scarce conceive another reason, than that that country was now too much turned heathen, and tithes should not be taken from heathens. For these Idumeans were but a remove from heathen: they had passed into the Jewish rites; but they were neither friends to the Jews nor to their religion.